Gaussian processes are now commonly used in dimensionality reduction approaches tailored to neuroscience, especially to describe changes in high-dimensional neural activity over time. As recording capabilities expand to include neuronal populations across multiple brain areas, cortical layers, and cell types, interest in extending Gaussian process factor models to characterize multi-population interactions has grown. However, the cubic runtime scaling of current methods with the length of experimental trials and the number of recorded populations (groups) precludes their application to large-scale multi-population recordings. Here, we improve this scaling from cubic to linear in both trial length and group number. We present two approximate approaches to fitting multi-group Gaussian process factor models based on (1) inducing variables and (2) the frequency domain. Empirically, both methods achieved orders of magnitude speed-up with minimal impact on statistical performance, in simulation and on neural recordings of hundreds of neurons across three brain areas. The frequency domain approach, in particular, consistently provided the greatest runtime benefits with the fewest trade-offs in statistical performance. We further characterize the estimation biases introduced by the frequency domain approach and demonstrate effective strategies to mitigate them. This work enables a powerful class of analysis techniques to keep pace with the growing scale of multi-population recordings, opening new avenues for exploring brain function.
A mainstream type of current self-supervised learning methods pursues a general-purpose representation that can be well transferred to downstream tasks, typically by optimizing on a given pretext task such as instance discrimination. In this work, we argue that existing pretext tasks inevitably introduce biases into the learned representation, which in turn leads to biased transfer performance on various downstream tasks. To cope with this issue, we propose Maximum Entropy Coding (MEC), a more principled objective that explicitly optimizes on the structure of the representation, so that the learned representation is less biased and thus generalizes better to unseen downstream tasks. Inspired by the principle of maximum entropy in information theory, we hypothesize that a generalizable representation should be the one that admits the maximum entropy among all plausible representations. To make the objective end-to-end trainable, we propose to leverage the minimal coding length in lossy data coding as a computationally tractable surrogate for the entropy, and further derive a scalable reformulation of the objective that allows fast computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MEC learns a more generalizable representation than previous methods based on specific pretext tasks. It achieves state-of-the-art performance consistently on various downstream tasks, including not only ImageNet linear probe, but also semi-supervised classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and object tracking. Interestingly, we show that existing batch-wise and feature-wise self-supervised objectives could be seen equivalent to low-order approximations of MEC. Code and pre-trained models are available at //github.com/xinliu20/MEC.
Decision-making algorithms are being used in important decisions, such as who should be enrolled in health care programs and be hired. Even though these systems are currently deployed in high-stakes scenarios, many of them cannot explain their decisions. This limitation has prompted the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) initiative, which aims to make algorithms explainable to comply with legal requirements, promote trust, and maintain accountability. This paper questions whether and to what extent explainability can help solve the responsibility issues posed by autonomous AI systems. We suggest that XAI systems that provide post-hoc explanations could be seen as blameworthy agents, obscuring the responsibility of developers in the decision-making process. Furthermore, we argue that XAI could result in incorrect attributions of responsibility to vulnerable stakeholders, such as those who are subjected to algorithmic decisions (i.e., patients), due to a misguided perception that they have control over explainable algorithms. This conflict between explainability and accountability can be exacerbated if designers choose to use algorithms and patients as moral and legal scapegoats. We conclude with a set of recommendations for how to approach this tension in the socio-technical process of algorithmic decision-making and a defense of hard regulation to prevent designers from escaping responsibility.
Recent advances in representation learning have demonstrated an ability to represent information from different modalities such as video, text, and audio in a single high-level embedding vector. In this work we present a self-supervised learning framework that is able to learn a representation that captures finer levels of granularity across different modalities such as concepts or events represented by visual objects or spoken words. Our framework relies on a discretized embedding space created via vector quantization that is shared across different modalities. Beyond the shared embedding space, we propose a Cross-Modal Code Matching objective that forces the representations from different views (modalities) to have a similar distribution over the discrete embedding space such that cross-modal objects/actions localization can be performed without direct supervision. In our experiments we show that the proposed discretized multi-modal fine-grained representation (e.g., pixel/word/frame) can complement high-level summary representations (e.g., video/sentence/waveform) for improved performance on cross-modal retrieval tasks. We also observe that the discretized representation uses individual clusters to represent the same semantic concept across modalities.
Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems into consideration and are unsupervised. By leveraging returns, the most important feedback signals in RL, we propose a novel auxiliary task that forces the learnt representations to discriminate state-action pairs with different returns. Our auxiliary loss is theoretically justified to learn representations that capture the structure of a new form of state-action abstraction, under which state-action pairs with similar return distributions are aggregated together. In low data regime, our algorithm outperforms strong baselines on complex tasks in Atari games and DeepMind Control suite, and achieves even better performance when combined with existing auxiliary tasks.
Domain shift is a fundamental problem in visual recognition which typically arises when the source and target data follow different distributions. The existing domain adaptation approaches which tackle this problem work in the closed-set setting with the assumption that the source and the target data share exactly the same classes of objects. In this paper, we tackle a more realistic problem of open-set domain shift where the target data contains additional classes that are not present in the source data. More specifically, we introduce an end-to-end Progressive Graph Learning (PGL) framework where a graph neural network with episodic training is integrated to suppress underlying conditional shift and adversarial learning is adopted to close the gap between the source and target distributions. Compared to the existing open-set adaptation approaches, our approach guarantees to achieve a tighter upper bound of the target error. Extensive experiments on three standard open-set benchmarks evidence that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts in open-set domain adaptation.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
External knowledge is often useful for natural language understanding tasks. We introduce a contextual text representation model called Conceptual-Contextual (CC) embeddings, which incorporates structured knowledge into text representations. Unlike entity embedding methods, our approach encodes a knowledge graph into a context model. CC embeddings can be easily reused for a wide range of tasks just like pre-trained language models. Our model effectively encodes the huge UMLS database by leveraging semantic generalizability. Experiments on electronic health records (EHRs) and medical text processing benchmarks showed our model gives a major boost to the performance of supervised medical NLP tasks.
Collaborative filtering often suffers from sparsity and cold start problems in real recommendation scenarios, therefore, researchers and engineers usually use side information to address the issues and improve the performance of recommender systems. In this paper, we consider knowledge graphs as the source of side information. We propose MKR, a Multi-task feature learning approach for Knowledge graph enhanced Recommendation. MKR is a deep end-to-end framework that utilizes knowledge graph embedding task to assist recommendation task. The two tasks are associated by cross&compress units, which automatically share latent features and learn high-order interactions between items in recommender systems and entities in the knowledge graph. We prove that cross&compress units have sufficient capability of polynomial approximation, and show that MKR is a generalized framework over several representative methods of recommender systems and multi-task learning. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that MKR achieves substantial gains in movie, book, music, and news recommendation, over state-of-the-art baselines. MKR is also shown to be able to maintain a decent performance even if user-item interactions are sparse.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.
Object detection is considered as one of the most challenging problems in computer vision, since it requires correct prediction of both classes and locations of objects in images. In this study, we define a more difficult scenario, namely zero-shot object detection (ZSD) where no visual training data is available for some of the target object classes. We present a novel approach to tackle this ZSD problem, where a convex combination of embeddings are used in conjunction with a detection framework. For evaluation of ZSD methods, we propose a simple dataset constructed from Fashion-MNIST images and also a custom zero-shot split for the Pascal VOC detection challenge. The experimental results suggest that our method yields promising results for ZSD.